A person enjoyed only scabies, lice and hunger there
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Ludmila Czerneková, née Kozmiková, was born in Ashgabat - the capital of the Turkmen Federal Republic of the USSR. It was not until much later that they set the date of her birth for February 14, 1936, only approximately. During the First Republic, her grandparents went with the Interhelpo cooperative to Kyrgyzstan, where they formed Komuna. After a few years, the Kozmík family returned to Czechoslovakia, but the mother of the witness Vlasta remained in the Soviet Union. In Zhytomyr, she met the witness’s father, Ivan Petrovich Spilkovsky. The father was a Ukrainian Jew and, according to Ludmila Czernekova, he commanded the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in Zhytomyr. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis shot members of his family. The mother then fled with five-year-old Ludmila and her seven-year-old sister Alena from Ukraine. After a dramatic journey which took several months, they arrived in Březnice in the Zlín region, where they remained until the end of the war. Witness’s grandfather František Kozmik joined the communist resistance during the war. After an extensive wave of arrests by the Gestapo – because he was afraid about his family and also about possible betrayal of somebody during the torture - he hanged himself in the forest cemetery in Zlín in mid-January 1943. Immediately after the liberation in May 1945, the mother decided to take her two daughters and return to Zhytomyr to look for their father. In the post-war chaos, when hundreds of thousands of refugees cruised all over Europe, they again spent several months in cattle wagons and various camps. However, they did not find Ivan Petrovič Spilkovsky in Žitomir, so they returned to Czechoslovakia in cattle wagons in 1947 as part of re-emigration. Ludmila joined Moravolen in Horní Benešov right after primary school, where she worked for thirty years until she retired. In 1955, she married Miroslav Czernek, with whom she had daughters Eva and Ludmila. In 2022 she lived with her husband in Horní Benešov.
